The one thing that Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur taught me was that you can just do things.
This is the story of professor Dheeraj Sanghi, probably one of the most based professors of IITK because he didn’t care for the status quo on most instances.
Mozilla had launched their ‘Winter of Security’ Programme to compete with Google’s Summer of Code. But they had one catch, it was supposed to be during the semester.
Now, in any normal institute, this would be categorized as ‘extra-curricular’ work - after all what is the application of security principles in a college that is known for solving some of the most pressing matters of theoretical computer science. And which college would allow you to get grades for ‘Open Source Contributions’ in Network Security?
But, then IIT Kanpur isn’t a normal college.
And to top it all off, Professor Dheeraj Sanghi had done something never done before, he constructed a class on ‘Network Security’ as a series of lectures by the best minds of ‘Security’ in the country. Here was a professor inviting industry professionals to teach a subject to kids and who himself was open to learn more about a rapidly evolving space.
I assembled two more crazy batchmates and thought maybe we should knock on the doors of our favorite renegade Professor.
Professor Dheeraj Sanghi - who was also running the show as the DOAA - was a busy man and he could have easily shunned us away.
Instead, he entertained the wild ideas of three kids who wanted to overload him with a UGP which would be spent contributing to Open Source and wherein he would be required to spend significant resources.
At this point, we were happy in just getting an audience to our idea. And a reasonable person would have said no but then what is reason to ambition.
Not only did Professor Dheeraj Sanghi agree to our wild plan. He spent the entire semster helping us because in the end we were one of the only teams to have been accepted for ‘Mozilla Winter of Security’ in India and were one of 12 teams across the world.
I learned a valuable lesson - You can just do things, and people will go out of their way to support you.